Jeff Davis

Biography

Jeff Davis was born in 1972 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and lives and works in Tempe, Arizona. He began making art in college, where he earned a math degree and added an art major, and he holds an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He worked in painting and printmaking until about 1999, when he moved to large-scale digital prints. He taught art for twenty years. Around a decade later he began generative work, using chance to make non-representational compositions. He first generated random data in Excel to guide geometric compositions built in Illustrator, then automated the process in Processing, which has been his main tool since. His abstract, algorithm-driven work focuses on structure and color within set parameters. He was accepted to SuperRare in 2019 and launched the Abstract Token series in 2020. Construction Token, his first Art Blocks project, sold out in about two hours. His Art Blocks projects also include Mechanical Drawing and Digital Sketch, and his other works include Drawings for a Monument and On-Chain Memory Token. He is a Strategic Advisor to Art Blocks, the founder of Davis Editions, a publisher of limited edition prints with contemporary artists, and a co-founder of the Generative Art Foundation. His work has been shown with Bright Moments in cities including Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, London, Berlin and New York, and at Art Dubai, the European Cultural Centre in Venice, the Torrance Art Museum and Arizona State University. It has been included in Natively Digital at Sotheby's New York and Ex Machina at Phillips London. He has also written two textbooks, Foundations of Design and Foundations of Color.